"The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography."
-- Oscar Wilde

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

A Literary Education and Other Essays, by Joseph Epstein (2014)

Here is
a book of deep learning, smart (in both senses of the word) writing, and significant
importance: A Literary Education and
Other Essays, by Joseph Epstein
(born 1937).

Epstein
is the former editor of the American
Scholar, and has taught English and writing at Northwestern University for
many years. Many of his 24 books are
collections of essays. Epstein is one of
our most significant living essayists – few contemporary writers have managed
to make take this form as their primary means of expression, and even fewer
have managed to be as successful at it as Epstein. Unlike academics who write mostly “for the
trade,” Epstein writes to be read by all, providing insight and context about
the world in which we live, and all-too-often pointing out where we have gone
wrong as a culture and as a people.

A
Literary Education collects those essays that have not yet found a home between
hardcovers. Do not think, though, that
this is merely Epstein clearing out the back files – each and every essay in
this collection is a delight.

The oldest
essay in the collection (about growing up in Chicago) dates back to 1969, the
most recent (on the late Hilton Kramer)
to 2013. He writes about his boyhood,
his period as an advisor to the National
Endowment for the Arts, on Jewish humor and standup comics, academic freedom,
the death of poetry, as well as people like Walter Cronkite (not a fan), Paul
Goodman (ditto) and Hilton Kramer
(whom Epstein seemed to idolize). What astonishes
upon reading them is the range of topics Epstein writes about, and the depth of
humor and humanity that he brings to them.

Certainly
humor and humanity are the two qualities that can be found in abundance in A
Literary Education. In a culture where
much writing about the arts has become arid or politicized or mired in theory,
Epstein talks abut aesthetic quality, the importance of distinguishing between
high and pop culture, and what art (and experience) means to us as human
beings.

Epstein
is also a man of serious purpose. He freely
admits that he was not much of a student, and that built a life of the mind for
himself through reading, through a love of high art and challenging literature,
and through what he calls a higher seriousness.
Higher seriousness, he implies, is meeting challenging works on their
own level, thinking about them, and maintaining an adult perspective. (The latter very difficult in these days of
perpetual adolescence, he opines.) We
need more like him.

He is
also never less than quotable. Writing about
the various flavors of deconstructionism that have plagued literary studies for
the past several years, Epstein muses so
many looney tunes, so few merrie melodies.
(This was repeated around Your Correspondent’s household for several
weeks.) Or, better yet, this wonderful
sentiment from the essay The Academic
Zoo: Theory – In Practice, which
chronicles how arts studies in our universities have really become an
intellectual garage sales:

All this might be entirely comical –
it’s still pretty damn ridiculous – if it didn’t have real intellectual
consequences. Life without a sense of
humor, which is life as it tends to be lived in the contemporary university, is
life without any sense of proportion or perspective. Where laughter has been abrogated, so has
common sense, which is why much in current English department studies seems,
not to put too fine a point on it, quite nuts.
Thus I read not long ago a batch of student papers in which I learned that
“English is the language of imposition for African-Americans, a language of
slavery and domination”; that “Shakespeare and [Robert] Coover [what a jolly
pairing!] are both products of propagators of a male-dominated capitalistic
society and both use their mastery of rhetoric to reinforce the status quo”;
and that Joseph Conrad, benighted fellow, shows “ethnocentric androgenism,”
which goes a long way toward explaining that Mr. Kurtz’s problem, in Heart of Darkness, is apparently that he
failed to acculturate sufficiently with the tribesmen he met up with in the
Congo. “You don’t like my brother,” an
old joke about cannibalism has it, “at least eat the noodles.”

Personal
story here: last Christmas I was at a
party thrown by an old friend. I was
talking about my boundless admiration and affection for Charles Dickens when a drunken English lit professor (with the worst
breath I have ever encountered) descended upon me.

Drunken
Professor sneers and asks how I could admire Dickens. I respond with his love of humanity, the
warmth of his heart, his expansive good cheer.
She turns to someone and says, “Is he serious?”

I go on
about how his characters become friends, and that there is the glow of hearth
and warmth and love. Metaphorically
patting me on the head, she says that he’s great in a Classic Comics sort of way, and that she used to love Classic
Comics, too.

So … I
couldn’t help it. I told her my favorite
Classic Comic was Remembrances of Things
Past. “Did they do that?” Drunken
Professor asks.

“Yes, it
was great. Visually it was a little
boring, because every panel was just this guy in bed.”

“How did
they fit it all in one comic?”

“Oh, it
was 45 issues, just this ongoing series.
But my favorite,” I said, “Was the Kafka Classic Comics.”

“They
did that, too?”

“Yes,
but they made the mistake of getting Jack
Kirby to draw it, so the roach looked like the Mighty Thor.”

Well … I
had lots of fun that night.

Back to
Epstein: one of the other amazing things about the man is that here is an
intellectual who, frankly, loves America.
He also believes, however, that with the advent of the various lunacies
of the 1960s, that the nation has been in an intellectual and cultural
decline. Here he is in the essay, What To Do About the Arts?:

Nobody with a serious or even a mild
interest in the arts likes to think he has lived his mature life through a bad
or even mediocre period of artistic creation. Yet a strong argument can be made
that ours has been an especially bleak time for the arts.

One of the quickest
ways of determining this is to attempt to name either discrete masterpieces or
impressive bodies of work that have been written, painted, or composed over the
past, say, 30 years. Inexhaustible lists do not leap to mind. Not only is one hard-pressed
to name recent masterpieces, but one’s sense of anticipation for the future is
less than keen. In looking back over the past two or three decades, what
chiefly comes to mind are fizzled literary careers, outrageous exhibitions and
inflated (in all senses of the word) reputations in the visual arts, and a sad
if largely tolerant boredom with most contemporary musical composition.

Perhaps
my favorite piece in A Literary Education is A Case of Academic Freedom, in which Epstein accounts the denial of
tenure to a radical activist professor, Barbara
Foley (born 1948) for her role in forcibly preventing a talk by Adolfo Calero, then commander-in-chief
of the Nicaraguan Democratic Forces, all in the name of “free speech.” Epstein does much to remind us that the
adjective Orwellian can be liberally applied to both the left and the right.

A
Literary Education comes highly recommended, and will be savored by anyone
serious about art, culture and education.

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James Abbott

James Abbott is a California-based writer and arts advocate. His online column The Jade Sphinx (http://thejadesphinx.blogspot.com/) champions the Fine Arts, featuring stories on such concepts as recognizable quality, artistic heritage and tradition, and techniques of the Great Masters.